"Okay, You've Got Six Minutes to Impress Me"

It's the People, Stupid... Full Disclosure: I'm not a techie. Sure, I put up with a lot more techno grief than the average sane person. (Thanks, Bill.) So it's not the technology that excites me. It's the people that make technological change interesting. It's the whole challenge of adoption within an organization.

How do you stimulate change? How do you spread an idea? First, be brief. Remember Michael Schrage's description of the Vice President for 5 Minutes? "If the vast majority of people can't extract genuine value from the innovation / initiative in less than five minutes, then the VP5M has the power to veto its deployment." (PikeNet Dispatch, July 24, 2000)

Second, demonstrate a prototype. That's the best way to promote collaboration. "The best demos let us improvise with each other, not just with the idea. ... Behavior change matters more than technological change." (Schrage, "Serious Play")

Combining these two thoughts led directly to the design of the Demos at this year's PikeNet Forum. Each firm will get just six minutes to demonstrate how its service works. As a start, each company has distilled the essence of its 360-second presentation into a one-sentence description posted at PikeNet. This should be a fun session -- maybe even a little wild and crazy. I'll report back to Dispatch readers on the success of our experiment. ... Here's the full list of firms providing demos: Accruent, AvidXchange, Facility Information Systems, JD Edwards, MortgageRamp, Reis, REsolve Technology, TheREALM, WorkplaceIQ, Yardi Systems.

--Peter Pike